Is Litmus the best email client/device tester? Any others you'd recommend?

[44MattWolf44]

Hi all

Litmus seems to be the gold standard on email client/device testing from what I've seen, but I'd love to hear if anyone has other opinions or resources to share. Anyone have any thoughts on EmailOnAcid as well?

Thank you!

[Dave_Roberts · Accepted solution]

It's been a few years, but I've used Litmus extensively and liked it a lot. As a developer it had all the tools I needed to test things out and the only downside I found was the cost. We use Email on Acid now and Im just not as big a fan -- it seems a bit less capable and inconsistent and I'm not a fan of the UI.

If you can swing it, I'd say you'll be further ahead going with Litmus but Email on Acid is "good enough" that you can get work done.

[dcreagh]

We use Litmus to validate the responsiveness of our emails. I inherited a set of messy email templates and Litmus helped me sort out the lack of responsiveness in several of the templates.

We do not have the Litmus to Marketo connector. This is only available through the Enterprise license and we opted not to pay for that. 

I've built a few custom emails where the design did not match any of our built email modules.  

Dennis

[44MattWolf44]

Interesting. I was under the impression you needed the Litmus + Marketo connector to utilize it with Marketo.

Without the connector, what specifically do you use it for?

Can you create emails in Marketo, and test their appearance on many email clients using Litmus, without the connector?

Alternatively, could you build emails in Litmus's template builder, test their appearance on many email clients, and then copy/paste the email's html into Marketo and send it through there?

Thanks a bunch in advance for your info

[Dave_Roberts]

When I used it, I didn't have the connector part hooked up so the HTML has to be a little different. I kept two copies of the code: One had the Marketo syntax for variables built in (the Marketo code) and the other was the rendered code (no variables) that I'd load into Litmus.

I'd grab the HTML from a rendered email by previewing the email in the editor and then paste that into Litmus to test it. Basically you've got to work around the tokens and variables (anything Marketo would substitute) to test the code in Litmus. In Litmus you can use their builder tool to paste in the HTML and run a render test. 

The thing I really liked about Litmus vs. Email on Acid was being able to dump the code into their builder tool and make some changes there for testing and test that before bringing anything back into Marketo. I got a ton of use from the builder tool and was able to learn a lot in a little time by having an environment like that where I could make incremental changes and render that code to test/review the changes. 

[SanfordWhiteman]

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I'd grab the HTML from a rendered email by previewing the email in the editor and then paste that into Litmus to test it.

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n.b. the Preview version (i.e. HTML of the IFRAMEd preview document) doesn’t exactly mirror what the rendered email will be, for example the browser will close tags even though the raw email has them unclosed. I like work with the real raw received HTML, although of course that’s more annoying to get.

[44MattWolf44]

Gotcha, thank you for the detailed explanation, this is really helpful info. 

And once you had the html from Marketo in the Litmus builder (with the unique Marketo variables changed), you'd be able to test and re-test the email on all email clients?

[Dave_Roberts]

Yeah, that's one of the features that took me from zero-to-hero -- once you've got the code in the Litmus builder you can make one change at a time and run a render on whatever platforms they've got available (which is plenty) so you can see if that specific change did something across a bunch of platforms at the same time. This was super helpful in working out some of the nuanced things with Outlook along the way.